The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future

When it first came into being in the late 1800's the electricity grid was a revolution in how power was delivered and how we thought about what we used it for in our lives. Over the course of the 20th century we gradually took the grid more and more for granted until it faded from view and became almost invisible to us. Over the last twenty years it has suddenly crashed back into view with Smart Meters, Smart Grids, Blackouts, Grid Resilience questions, Distributed Generation and the possibility of micro-grids and nano-grids. How to make sense of all of this? Gretchen Bakke's book The Grid helps to provide clarity, context and understanding.The Grid, is a very ambitious undertaking. Bakke deploys her skills as a cultural anthropologist to understand and explain the way that the electrical grid in the US works. Given that the grid is, as she notes, the "world's largest machine" with a long and intricate history, and that this history is a nexus of fearsome technical, legal and cultural interactions this is no easy task. She manages the task with great skill and provides an excellent account of the grid throughout its past into the present day and also hazards some thoughts about its future.This is a very timely book since the demands we are making of the grid are changing very rapidly. Fifty years ago the utilities were seen as safe, if sleepy, investments. They occupied a predictable world of regularly increasing electrical consumption where their main responsibility was to "keep the lights on" and, provided they did that, they would be protected from disruptive competition and would be allowed to collect their rents on the massive infrastructure in which they had invested.This has all changed, first in the seventies with the oil price shocks upended the energy world in a way that resulted first in the National Energy Act in 1978 passed by the Carter Administration, but then followed a decade later by the Energy Policy Act (1992) passed by George H.W. Bush's government. These acts changed the comfortable world of utilities forever. These changes and our resulting expectations have changed with increasing pace since then with the mass deployment of renewables, the continuing price-reduction that makes storage a viable possibility and the movement towards electric vehicles to name just three major societal shifts that we are currently living through.Bakke explains step-by-step why these and other developments are instrumental in changing the way we think about electricity and its delivery to our homes and businesses. She has a marvelous ability to make even complicated technical or political issues accessible and clear. The subject matter in the book is well structured and the narrative always purposeful and entertaining as well as informative.If you have never given the grid so much as five minutes' thought but are concerned about how we will manage to successfully evolve our electrical infrastructure in response to the competing pressures of our modern world I can thoroughly recommend this book as a marvelous introduction to what is an under-appreciated and too often neglected field.

This is a good, solid read - all 352 pages. Bakke has distinct bias against the efficiency - conservation perspectives of the Rocky Mountain Institute and Amory Lovins. She ignores passive solar and conservation architecture and assumes electricity as we have come to know it will always be - a clear utility bias, and there will always be more to use. Negawatts are given short shrift. Energy not used is equally if not more valuable than energy used. Why pay for something when you don't need to?! There is minimal discussion of the antiquated national grid and its vulnerability. No discussion of how those who make use of photovoltaics use the grid as a back up battery. We don't need to be plugged in all the time - natural light is okay for light and heating. No discussion of specific heat, thermal mass or site appropriate building. Minimal discussion of "power walls" (large back up batteries) for individual homes and businesses. Minimal discussion is given to Nikola Tesla, even though our modern electric society is largely based on Tesla's findings.Sequoia-KIngs Canyon Natl Park powers its backcountry radio repeaters with photovoltaic panels - 1 hour of operating time for each 11 hours of charging. The system serves the Parks very well with minimal maintenance or interference from Marmots. The national Grid is antiquated and requires a lot of maintenance.I encounter people who install back up generators all the time. Why not live comfortably so that you never need a back up generator?! We need to think and act long term, i.e., use of electricity in space travel, on the Moon and Mars and beyond.

Review of Bakke’s "The grid" by Paul F. Ross Gretchen Bakke presents a very interesting, very readable look at the history of electric power in the United States from Thomas Edison until now in order to assist us, the readers, in understanding and helping shape the still uncertain details affecting the future of electric power. The ubiquity of electric power in human affairs is certain. Just how that power will be provided, its fuel sources, and its____________________________________________________________________________________Bakke, Gretchen "The grid: The fraying wires between Americans and our energy future" 2016, Bloomsbury, New York NY, xxx + 353 pages____________________________________________________________________________________distribution methods are far from certain although they have been finding their unguided way to the present throughout the last century. The stunning contribution of Bakke, not an electrical engineer, is that she has the freedom to see what history, new technology, new uses, social expectations, and legal and economic structures have done to shape what we have and determine what we will have in the future. The 22 July 2016 issue of Science arrived in my US mailbox, I saw Cymene Howe’s review of Bakke’s book (p 355), and I went to my computer immediately to order the book from Amazon.com. Edison, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, invented and put in place direct current generators of electric power and distributed that power over local grids (to customers less than a mile from the generator) to produce light in electric light bulbs, also his invention. This method for lighting became a competitor to lamps that were being fueled by whale oil ("Moby Dick") and kerosene (John D. Rockefeller). By 1910, electricity and electric light became available to the urban and the rich. But line losses at low voltage (100v or less) and high current are large (watts = current-in-amps-squared times volts … notice that term showing the current is squared), power being given up as heat as the current pushes through the line’s resistance, so electric power of this kind cannot be shipped very far (thus the early proliferation of power generating plants in an urban area like New York or Chicago). Then George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla invented alternating current and its generation. Instead of flowing just one direction as with direct current, alternating current flows back and forth in an electric line (conductor). That changing direction, and the growth and collapse of magnetic fields around the changing current, make transformers possible … two coils of wire, a primary and a secondary. Feed current from the generator into the primary winding and, although the primary is insulated from the secondary, electrical current flows (back and forth) in the secondary and in the loads (light bulbs, electric motors) the secondary is feeding. The magic feature of transformers is that by feeding 100v into a primary with 100 turns in its coil, one can get 400v or even 50,000v from the secondary winding if you put enough turns into the coil of the secondary. The power transfer from primary to secondary is very efficient. The important new circumstance is that lots of power, measured in watts, can be moved along the 50,000v lines as alternating current using very little current … and thus experiencing very little line loss to heat. When the power gets to its destination, perhaps 200 miles or even 1,000 miles from its generating plant, another transformer can be used to step the voltage back down from 50,000v to much lower voltage (110v for use in our house lighting circuits) and electricity becomes relatively safe to use when untrained-in-the-ways-of-electricity human beings are nearby. This technological flip-flop was so quick that alternating current was in widespread use by the 1920s. Shipping alternating-current electric power over long distances made it possible for one power plant to serve a very large area and so society began to think of electric power as a “natural monopoly,” power companies as serving a large area, and the leaders of power companies as needing government oversight so they did not take advantage of their monopoly power. Electricity has another characteristic that is important. It must be used as soon as it is produced. So far, there are no easy and available methods for storing it for later use. Therefore demand and production must always be equal. Power plants have the characteristics of machinery … they work most of the time but sometimes must be shut down for maintenance or simply break down. Demand from people and businesses has its own ups and downs … we all like to sleep at night and work in the daytime … we go to work and return home at approximately the same times for five days out of seven … we call for air conditioning in the summertime and heat in the winter. Thus power production must vary with demand. The electric utilities have the task of “balancing” their production and distribution to meet demands that go up and down during every 24-hour cycle and sometimes take unexpected leaps or collapses. In recent decades the desire to minimize atmospheric pollution has caused us to try to downsize on coal and oil use, accept new supplies of natural gas with appreciation, continue to use hydro power where it is available, escape nuclear power generation when we can, and add power generation from solar energy and from wind. Suddenly (as measured by social and economic timelines) power is being generated in variable ways and in varying amounts (clouds go by, night arrives, the wind stops) in many different places. With these dispersed power producers in place (my neighbor’s home’s rooftop), we’ve asked, through governments, that the power companies accept all these power inputs and keep the grid balanced. Can it be done? Bakke sees the history, explains it to us so that we can understand it, includes the economic and societal and government and technological change elements in “the system,” and presents us with the challenge. She lets us know why our actions and our attitudes influence the solutions. “The grid” is not “something in an out-of-sight place to which we need pay no attention until the lights are out at our house.” She lets us see how reliability of the supply chain for coal or diesel oil is just as important to the reliability of “the grid” as is the risk that a tree will fall across a power line and interrupt power to our house. She helps us understand that it takes almost as much diesel fuel to deliver a gallon of diesel oil for use in an electric generator at an isolated military location in Afghanistan as the delivered-fuel itself. She lets us understand that our attitudes, our political actions, the operation of our governments are as important to delivering least-costly, uninterrupted electrical power to our future homes and offices as are the technological steps toward shipping electric power without wires and balancing the grid using smart metering, controllable loads (we may have to give the grid the power to turn down our air conditioning in order to balance production capacity and demand), and batteries of unimaginable properties to our electrical futures. Through her eyes we can glimpse some of the future that may emerge, but the important lesson she teaches is that we have to be a part of the planning in the same way that we are a part of the system’s performance. I glanced at a review of her book posted on Amazon.com and the reviewer was wondering how a cultural anthropologist (and a woman, to boot) is qualified to write about the electric power grid. We need Bakke’s insights very much since her behavioral science perspective brings a vital viewpoint to the task of shaping the future … a viewpoint that the reviewer I was reading is not able to bring to the work.Copyright © 2016 by Paul F. Ross All rights reserved.Bellevue, Washington28 August 2016

Still reading it. I also bought a Kindle edition so I could pass on the print version to my son before I’m finished reading

Great assessment of the past, the present and the future. I found the book useful background for my studies on renewable energy finance.

A wonderfully written history of electricity.

Interesting book that explains how the grid's history and how it works. Wish someone would write the same for the UK - where our creaking system seems to be completely unready for any significant decarbonisation

A rather mundane subject made interesting and absorbing read.